tinychaseExoplanet kiosks · the sky and the distances
Where We Have Looked
Every confirmed planet, placed on the sky. It is not a map of where planets are. It is a map of where telescopes stared: the dense patch is the Kepler field, a hundred square degrees toward Cygnus that one spacecraft watched for four years and that holds of everything known. Hover a dot to name it.
The nearest fifteen systems
Distance in light-years, and the year the light we see now left the star. Every one of these was found by the star's wobble, because a transit needs a lucky alignment.
How far out
Planets known within each distance. Half of everything known is over a thousand light-years away, and the microlensing planets are mostly toward the galactic centre, ten to twenty thousand light-years off.
Data: TerraPulse exoplanet dex (NASA Exoplanet Archive, confirmed planets table; US federal public domain), exported 2026-09-27. The sky map is an equal-area Hammer projection in equatorial coordinates, right ascension increasing to the left as on a star chart, with the galactic plane sketched for orientation. One dot per planet, so multi-planet systems stack. Distances are the archive's, mostly from Gaia parallaxes; 1 parsec = 3.26 light-years. "Light left in" is today's year minus the light-travel time, rounded. The Kepler field count uses a rectangle of RA 280 to 300 degrees and Dec 36 to 52, slightly larger than the mission's footprint.